o school
in winter, but Charlotte taught Jack herself--he was only eight. And he
used to make Joey glum with envy during the holidays by telling him of
how, in the autumn evenings, Aunt Sophy and he (Jack) would roast
chestnuts together before tea--while she told him "Jim hummers of fairy
stories."

Sophy read a good deal, but nothing that could touch her too nearly. She
was afraid of stirring the deeper self that seemed so sound asleep.

It was odd how bits of her own girlish verse had kept haunting her ever
since her return. One she often thought of at this time:

"Frailly partitioned is the Inn of Life:
I will go very softly, lest perchance
I rouse the traveller Sorrow...."

During the autumn of her first year at Sweet-Waters a strange quickening
came to her spirit. It came swift and sudden, without warning, as such
things always come. "Whereas I was blind, now I see," said the man
restored to sight by miracle. Whereas Sophy's creative will had been
dead within her, now it lived. It was like the immemorially old and ever
new mystery of conception. Her mind was with child--in a supreme, sweet
pang it revealed itself. The triumphant blue of an October sky glowed
through her window. It was ablaze with silver cloud-sails. Sophy knelt
gazing up at this splendour, and within her all was splendour--a glory
of thanksgiving--a glory of conscious fertility. The majestic blue of
the sky seemed to her like God manifest.

III

It was again June in Virginia--the third summer since Sophy's return.
Her new volume of poems, _Risorgimento_, had come out that April. It was
being widely reviewed. The "people who mattered" had given it praise.
This made her very happy. She had a fortunate nature. Things did not
grow stale for her. The powers of wonder and of joy were very strong in
her. The lines of George Herbert sang in her heart:

"And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be,
That I am he,
On whom thy tempests fell all night."

But apart from the resurgence of her poetic gift, her whole life seemed
also quickening. As the spring burgeoned and flowered into summer, she
herself seemed burgeoning and flowering. A great restlessness came over
her. She felt impelled to rush out with the tide of spring into the
glittering, newly wakened world.

One afternoon t